Why is wood seen as a climate-neutral fuel, but coal and oil are not? All these fuels are based on composed organism that collected carbons over their lifetimes, that are now used as a fuel. The only difference is the cycle time.
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I really hate the term climate-neutral, because whilst burning wood only releases as much carbon as the tree absorbed during its life, that is true for pretty much everything. As long as we exclude extraterrestrial ressource mining, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, there will always be the same number of carbon atoms on our planet, therefore everything is carbon neutral.
The big difference is of course that even the oldest trees are “only” a few millenia old. Therefore all the wood in the world only contains the excess carbon of a few thousand years. But the plants that are the basis for oil, coal, and gas formed layers over millions of years, therefore containing the excess carbon of millions of years.
So it is a bit like how lighting a candle in your house won’t change the room temperature, but burning thousands of them simultaneously will. The problem isn’t that oil is somehow worse than wood (considering the impurities in wood and oil I’d even argue that oil is better), the problem is that we burn oil way faster than it grows. That being said, if we somehow replaced all our oil fueled technology with wood fueled tech, it wouldn’t change anything (at least regarding carbon neutrality)
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